Apple TV sales to pass 1 million units — Are we impressed yet?

Apple just announced today that they expect sales of the Apple TV to pass 1 million units sometime later this week. A million of anything is always nice to celebrate, but let’s put that into some perspective. Apple has sold 1 million Apple TVs since its introduction in October some 11 weeks ago. By comparison, the iPhone 4 sold 1.7 million units in the first 3 days according to Apple.

Competitor Roku has not reached the 1 million mark yet, despite having been on the market since 2008. Interestingly, Roku reports that since the introduction of the AppleTV, sales have doubled. Roku CEO Anthony Wood told Business Insider that sales are on track for 1 million units by the end of the year, and Apple has helped bring attention and consumer awareness to this category.

Martin Bryant at The Next Web notes that sales of the Apple TV have primarily come from the North American market, where you can get TV show rentals and Netflix in addition to HD Movies and YouTube. Around the world, you are limited to Movies and YouTube, which is not as compelling.

As a part of a Mac home ecosystem, the Apple TV fits in very nicely, allowing easy streaming of all the media in your iTunes libraries on the network. Roku has the advantage when it comes to resolution, offering a 1080p output on its two higher end models, trumping the AppleTV with its 720p output. I’m not sure how much it matters when it comes to streaming; however, since much of the streaming content is very compressed and not always available in 1080p, a purist will really only be satisfied with Blu-Ray, while everyone else won’t even notice the difference. In the end, the question is one of convenience. Does the Apple TV offer enough convenient access to TV, Movies, Netflix and my iTunes media, to outweigh the decrease in resolution? 1 million people seem to think so.